A $2.1 billion investment was announced by the Biden Administration for the U.S. public health and healthcare sectors in order to improve infection prevention and control activities.
The administration is working through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and investing American Rescue Plan funding to ensure state, local, and territorial public health departments, as well as other partner organizations, have the necessary resources required to take on the fight against infections in U.S. healthcare facilities.
This funding would allow the U.S. to expand on its public health while improving its quality of healthcare in the country, while also helping close the gap between existing healthcare inequalities.
Assistance to healthcare providers in the prevention of infections in the healthcare setting, rapid response in the detection and containment of infectious organisms, enhancement of laboratory capacity, and engagement of increased innovation in the fight against infectious diseases would all be possible through this funding.
These improvements would spread across the healthcare sector, which includes 6,000 hospitals, 15,400 nursing homes, 4,700 ambulatory surgery centers, 7,900 dialysis clinics and will also cover outpatient settings.
The funding will further help mitigate healthcare-associated infections that had risen across U.S. hospitals as a result of Covid-19.
The CDC will release $1.25 billion of the total amount for 64 state, local and territorial health departments in support of the work, in the next 3 years. $885 million will be issued in October of 2021 to the health departments.
The majority of this initial investment will be used in October; amounting to $500 million to combat Covid-19 and protect the most affected population which is:
Long-term care strike teams and state-based nursing homes. This CDC and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)funding would allow for the training of staff and the deployment of strike teams which would assist skilled nursing facilities and nursing homes, along with other long-term care facilities that have reported or suspected Covid-19 outbreaks.
The leftover $385 million which is to be awarded in October 2021 will be provided tostate, local, and territorial health departments to address 5 areas in need of strengthening:
- State Capacity for prevention, and detection, and containment of threats of infection for which the CDC would provide assistance to the public health departments healthcare facilities. This will lower the infection spread in healthcare settings and help to identify, address and keep track of health equity.
- Laboratory capacity in healthcare: The funds would help to increase capacity for the surveillance of emerging pathogens, allowing for the improved identification of infectious disease carriers. This would include “nightmare bacteria” such as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales (CRE) and Candida auris. There have been outbreaks of similar antibiotic-resistant infectious agents throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Project Firstline: The introduced funds would help expand on the efforts aimed at the design and implementation for effective infection control and prevention. This would also help train frontline staff and help build a collaborative environment for public health, healthcare and academic partners of effective infection prevention and control training and education to frontline healthcare staff, leveraging a unique collaborative of healthcare, public health, and academic partners.Project Firstline addresses disparity across the U.S. healthcare sector and helps ensure healthcare workers have access to knowledge that will help protect themselves as well as the wider community. In the first year of the project, 130 educational products were developed with an upward of 200 educational events on infection management hosted engaging almost 16,300 healthcare workers from a diverse background, ranging from nurses and physicians to environmental service workers. Its message was able to reach a wide audience with more than 1,700 social media posts shared.
- National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN): The funds would support the state’s efforts in improvement of NHSN data collection from various healthcare facilities, including, wider coverage for reporting, state coordination, and in providing technical assistance to healthcare facilities reporting technical healthcare data.
- Antibiotic Prescription and Use: The funds would help support data analysis of antibiotic use and help implement programs aimed at improving antibiotic prescriptions and help limit antibiotic disparities in communities. During the pandemic, antibiotics have been routinely prescribed which has increased antibiotic resistance.
$880 million will additionally be utilized for the next several years for the support of healthcare partners, but also for academic institutions as well as nonprofit partners to develop newer prevention techniques and control training, technical assistance and data collection.
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has further reinforced the grave importance of infection prevention and control in healthcare, to ensure the U.S. population remains healthy, even the most at-risk individuals.
2020 was a year for extraordinary challenges in the healthcare sector, due to a surge in hospitalizations, staff shortages as well as other operational hurdles limiting the effectiveness of the infection prevention and control protocols.
Studies of recent nature are showing increased instances of healthcare-associated infections in central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs), ventilator-associated events (VAEs), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and catheter- associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs), with data also showing the need for increased strengthening of infection prevention and control capacities urgently.
